Pasadena Private Eye Specializes in Tracking Down That Old Flame

She was short and compactly built, with a look of vast patience in her eyes. They were hazel eyes. Or maybe light brown. “It’s funny, but I can’t remember that far back,” said Robert Landers.

He has not seen the woman, a typist in his aunt’s office in Long Beach, for 32 years now. The last time was in 1956. Landers walked away from her after an argument that hot summer evening in South Gate. But those deep, quiet, reproachful eyes keep summoning him. It has become an obsession, Landers said.

“I don’t want to kiss her or marry her,” said the 61-year-old retired engineer from Yorba Linda. “I just want to talk to her.”

This is where Ron Crisp comes in. Crisp is a private eye of sorts. He runs a Pasadena-based agency called Old Flame Finders. He specializes in broken dreams, following a trail of phone book entries and personnel records deep into the past, scraping away at a crusty accumulation of old addresses, broken marriages and career bends, to track down lost loves.

“A lot of it is loneliness,” said Crisp, 42, a tall, plump-faced man with graying hair, explaining his clients’ motivation. “People wonder, ‘Can I apply what I know now to that old object of my affection?’ They’re older, they have more self-esteem. Who knows?”

Crisp got the idea three years ago, when he tried to track down an old flame of his own. “I was sitting around, listening to old music and I got this attack of nostalgia,” he said.

In Crisp’s case, it was a girlfriend from 25 years ago, back when Crisp was the star of the Carson High School wrestling team. “We were going to get married and that sort of stuff,” said Crisp. “You know how it is. She was going to be a nice housewife and I was going to be a lawyer.”

But they split up because Crisp did not want to take her to the prom. “She wanted to go to all the dances,” said the detective, who works out of borrowed space in an office near downtown Pasadena. “That was a woman’s kind of thing in those days. In the ‘60s, guys weren’t that hot to go to proms.”

The girl found another boyfriend, Crisp joined the Army and they lost touch. Today she lives in a small city in Northern California. “I called the church she used to go to and got the name of her aunt,” says Crisp. “The aunt told me all I needed to know about her. She had graduated from college and gotten her teaching credential. She was married and she had just had a baby. That was enough to quench my curiosity.” Crisp never called her.

But the idea stuck.

Operates on Obsessions

He told his friends Jim Laris and Marge Wood, co-publishers of the Pasadena Weekly, about his venture into his own past. “They thought it was a great idea,” says Crisp. “Marge wanted me to find an old flame of hers.” They also gave Crisp, who has been knocking around the detective profession since he got out of the Army 20 years ago, a desk at the Review office.

Crisp, a recovering alcoholic, knows about obsessions.

Detective work, for example. It started out as a way to make money, then it became an all-consuming pursuit. He had worked in intelligence in the Army and done undercover work for a national detective agency, investigating industrial thefts. Ten years ago, he started a successful detective agency, Crisp & Marley (Marley was fictitious; Crisp just liked the sound of the name.) He began working for lawyers around the Pasadena Courthouse.

It was tepid legal work, serving processes, doing legal research and preparing pleadings, until a lawyer asked him to get involved in a murder case.

So far, Crisp has handled about 80 cases, finding the flame in question in about two-thirds of them. He charges a maximum of $250. Most of his clients are older than 35, single or unhappily married, curious or reaching for lost youth, Crisp says. “They want to go back to better times,” he says.

But you never can tell what you’re going to find. As often as not, the old flame is married to someone else. “Sometimes you have to walk on eggshells,” says Crisp, who requires that his clients sign a contract agreeing not to cause physical or mental harm to the subject of the search.

‘Chickened Out’

Marge Wood wanted Crisp to find a college boyfriend. “There was unfinished business between us,” she said. “I had gotten angry with him because he went out with someone else. I decided to get back at him by going out with one of his best friends. He never spoke to me again. He took it rather hard.”

Crisp found the man in an upscale suburb of Kansas City. “I chickened out,” said Wood. “I never contacted him. I just felt he wouldn’t be living in a place like that unless he had a family.”

Crisp tracked down Landers’ beguiling ex-girlfriend, too, in a Sacramento-area town. The name was the same, at least, and so were many of the details of the Sacramento-area woman’s life. But she was married, with a couple of children, and she denied knowing Landers.

After being contacted by Crisp, the woman even telephoned Landers, identifying herself with her married name. “She didn’t say much,” Landers says. “She was calm, cool and collected. She kept denying she had ever lived down here.”

Last month, the melancholic engineer drove to the Northern California city and parked in front of the woman’s house. No one came out and no one went in. “What was I supposed to do--go banging on the door?” said Landers. “‘They might haul me off to the hoosegow.”

Finally, Landers pulled resignedly away from the silent house, heading back to the freeway and to his lonely obsession with the girl with the patient eyes.